"High Rollers" Arrested for Raptor Killings

Illegal Trapping of Hawks and Falcons Spurs Efforts To Strengthen Migratory Bird Treaty Act

An ongoing investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS Operation High Roller) has uncovered thousands of illegal raptor killings in Oregon, California, Washington, New Mexico, Texas, and other states, and has led to calls for stiffer penalties for violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

“Operation High Roller”, a 14-month investigation into roller pigeon clubs, discovered that some club members trapped and killed raptors, specifically Cooper's and Red-tailed Hawks, and Peregrine Falcons. Investigators estimated that leaders and members of such clubs in the Los Angeles metropolitan area alone are responsible for killing 1,000 to 2,000 raptors per year.
The full story here.
"High Rollers" Arrested for Raptor Killings

My personal opinion;
This is a prime example of a Pigeon Sport being destroyed from within by its own members.

National Pigeon Day - a Pigeon Blitz! Event details
Venue: Central Park
Date: Friday, June 13, 2008 (4:00 PM)

New York City, New York
40.7146, -74.0058
Category
Family
Description
4 - 8 pm

Pilgrim Hill in Central Park
New York, NY
enter on 5th Avenue @ E. 72nd Street

Entertainment, speeches, materials distribution, candlelight prayer service with guitar accompaniment and pigeon shaped cookies. Learn how carrier pigeons Cher Ami, GI Joe and Winkie saved the lives of more than 1,000 men in wartime. Become part of Project Pigeon Watch and have fun learning about our fascinating NYC residents.

Speakers include: Council Member Tony Avella, Nellie McKay, In Defense of Animals, Deacon Joseph Dwyer, Janice Fredericks, United Poultry Concerns, Susan Raimond, Raghav K. Goyal and Ana A. Garcia.

Thank you to In Defense of Animals who will provide a banner, Hanna Fushihara Aron who will bake pigeon shaped cookies, God's Creatures Ministry who will provide candles, and the United Federation of Teachers Humane Education Committee who will bring Pigeon Watch materials for distribution.

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National Pigeon Day - a Pigeon Blitz! at Central Park (Friday, June 13, 2008) - Upcoming

Venice bans pigeon feeding in St. Mark's Square
By Elisabetta Povoledo
Published: May 8, 2008

VENICE: All it takes is a handful of birdseed to transform any tourist visiting Venice's historic St. Mark's Square into a human perch for a fluttering mass of pushy pigeons.

But a Venetian pigeon's life may now be for the birds: A municipal ordinance banning people from feeding them in the square went into effect May 1.

Especially ruffled are the 19 vendors licensed to sell birdseed in the square, who are out of a job. "It's a tradition," said one vendor who, like most others, declined to give his name. "It's like removing Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs."

When Venetian officials first voted to outlaw pigeon feeding 11 years ago, the area of St. Mark's was exempted because of the iconic status of the birds and their feeders. But it ultimately became clear that for any real reduction in the bird population, an important food supply - St. Mark's official birdseed hawkers - had to be cut off.

The vendors fear the city's decision will put an end to a century-old tradition.
"Children are crying because they can't feed the birds," said another ruddy-faced vendor. Actually, children last Sunday seemed pretty content, having substituted potato chips and bread sticks for the now verboten birdseed. The pigeons did not seem to mind the change in diet either.

Since the edict went into effect, the local police have been discreetly discouraging tourists from feeding the pigeons without handing out fines - for the moment.

Like other metropolises with a significant pigeon population, including New York and London, Venice has long been concerned with the potential hazards the birds pose to human health, not to mention the damage caused by their guano and taste for marble. Previous efforts to control their numbers - nets, spikes and electronic contraptions to deter perching - have been mostly unsuccessful.

What has made the situation particularly drastic in Venice is the spiraling number of tourists - about 20 million a year by official estimates - which has triggered a whole new law of nature: More tourists equals more birdseed sold and more garbage produced. That equals more pigeons and more damage to the historic buildings in the square, including the delicate mosaics on the façade of St. Mark's Basilica.

Sergio Lafisca, the Venice health expert responsible for the Department of Prevention, estimates that there are now about 130,000 pigeons living in Venice's historic center, about 40 times the number that he said international studies propose as the optimal concentration per square kilometer. "Even locusts are cute on their own, but then read what the Bible says about invasions," he said.

Tests on the birds have also determined that many carry one pathogen or another. "It's easy to imagine why we're concerned," he said.

The monuments on the square are bearing the brunt of the invasion. Pigeons usually do not sleep where they eat, but the certainty of a 24/7 feeding frenzy has induced many to make St. Mark's their year-round home, setting up nests among elegant cornices or in other fragile spots. As a result, the statues on the facades are now cobwebbed with dozens of fine scratch marks from where the pigeons try to grip onto the statues to roost.

And pigeons, like chickens, seek calcium carbonate for their eggs.

"They peck at the most exposed parts of the marble," as well as the stucco that restorers use in their work, said Renata Codello, the state art official charged with preserving the square. She flipped through a series of photographs of pockmarked statuary.

"I have nothing against pigeons," Codello insisted, though she said the birds cause "immense damage." This costs taxpayers from €16 to €23 a pigeon a year in cleanup costs, according to a report by the Italian economic research institute Nomisma.

In the end, only one strategy has ever really worked to keep the pigeon population down in Venice. "Until the 1950s they used to eat them. I'm told they're very tasty," Lafisca said. But he would not advocate eating pigeon meat today because the birds are too sickly and small. Nor would he allow his son to pose for photos with pigeons on his head.

City officials are now negotiating with the vendors to give them alternative jobs or a cash buyout.

The vendors, for their part, want City Hall to back down and are circulating a petition among tourists that they say already has hundreds of signatures. Venetians are less likely to sign. The locals tend to see pigeons much as Woody Allen once described them - as "rats with wings."

For some vendors, the writing is on the wall.

"I'm afraid it's over," said Rosanna Ribul, a vendor whose grandfather was given one of the first licenses in the square 90 years ago. She spoke of dozens of people who regularly sought her out bearing photographs taken long ago when they were children, or on their honeymoon, and she'd sold them birdseed. "They ask me, do you remember? But I never do."

The Link
Venice bans pigeon feeding in St. Mark's Square - International Herald Tribune

Pigeon strays half-continent off course
Posted by Matt Vande Bunte | The Grand Rapids Press May 21, 2008 08:42AM
Categories: Breaking News

WYOMING -- The economy has gone south, but who says West Michigan is a bad place to land?

A missing homing pigeon has flown into Wyoming. And, get this, the bird left Southern California to come here.

That's about 2,000 miles, as the crow -- er, pigeon -- flies. But there's no telling where this bird has been.

"I'd like to know what he's been doing the last month," said Rebecca Vincent, associate veterinarian at the Animal Medical Center of Wyoming, where the year-old pigeon is housed.

Vincent took care of the bird last weekend when it was found in an outdoor play area for boarding dogs at the clinic, 2330 44th St. SW.

"It was hanging on the corner on the dryer vent, and the dogs were barking at it," she said. "It was exhausted. It walked right up and sat on my hand. It was just so happy to see me, climbed right up on me."

The pigeon has a band on its leg with data identifying it as a 2007 hatchling registered with the National Pigeon Association. Numbers on the band led Vincent to a pigeon club in Compton, near Los Angeles, and eventually connected her with the bird's owner.

"He lost it a month ago," she said. "He was working with it, and he said something scared it, and it took off and never came back. He just assumed somebody must have eaten him.

"Pigeons are notoriously good at finding their way back to where they belong. This is a really lost one, though."

Homing pigeons are known for an innate ability to remember where they live, even when they are more than 1,000 miles from home. The birds were used to transport messages in World War I, and have been used as a means of communication around the world for hundreds of years.

But for one to cross the country is out of character, said Randy Homrich, president of the Grand Rapids Racing Pigeon Club.

"For a bird to fly from Los Angeles clear to Michigan is very unusual. A lot of times they get carried with the wind. Maybe they had a lot of high winds (out West)."

Homrich said a racing pigeon with a good pedigree could be worth as much as $100,000. The pigeon at the Animal Medical Center might be worth about $25, not enough for the California owner to have it returned.

Because letting loose the pigeon would be "like letting somebody's lost Cocker spaniel go," Vincent is seeking a new owner for the bird that her 3-year-old son calls "Compass," after a cartoon homing pigeon that always gets lost.

"They can live up to 35 years, so it could be a major commitment to take him on," she said.

And directions, of course, are not included.

The Link
Pigeon strays half-continent off course - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Men + Pigeons
January 24, 2008 – 10:56 am

Nikola Tesla spent the last 10 years of his life making daily pilgrimages from the New Yorker Hotel to Bryant Park to see the pigeons, especially a particular gray and white one. He wasn’t the only New Yorker preoccupied with pigeons: producer Benjamen Walker reports on other real-life and fictional New York men who liked them as well.

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Blog » Men + Pigeons

I am orginally from Grand Rapids,MI so I know exactly where that Pigeon was found. 44 th street and surrounding areas are avery buzy place.

WORLD PIGEON POPULATION TO TOP 400 MILLION

SURGING GLOBAL PIGEON COUNT VEXES CITIES Over the years, cities have tried imaginative techniques to cull the disease-carrying birds. Best way: stop feeding them

The pigeon is a heavenly symbol of peace, love and purity but it also produces 12 kilos of excrement a year and is widely decried as a flying rat that soils facades and spreads disease in cities all over the world.

Scientists, city officials and animal welfare activists met in the western German city of Essen on Tuesday for Germany's first Town Pigeon Conference to discuss how to deal with the growing pigeon population which is expected to rise by around 50 million to up to 400 million worldwide in the next 10 years as a result of growing urbanization.

The pigeon derives from the rock dove and was one of the first animals to be domesticated, some 10,000 years ago, in the Middle East. There are around 300 varieties of the bird. It was initially bred to be eaten, and its excrement, guano, was a prized fertilizer.

The inconspicuous gray bird with a fatty neck has adapted better to life in urban public areas than any other animal, and its presence is truly global.

There are around one million of them in New York, and Venice has the highest pigeon density with an estimated three birds per human inhabitant. In most big European towns, there is around one pigeon for every 20 citizens.

"Pigeons have had a gigantic career as a symbol of love, of marital fidelity, of peace," Professor Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel who has studied pigeons for decades, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Historically it has such a positive, heavenly image that killing the bird is still regarded as immoral and unethical by many."

Throughout history, pigeons have found plentiful food close to where humans live, either by being fed directly or eating spilt horse feed, or by picking up rubbish that had gathered in the cracks of the cobblestones that were commonplace in medieval European towns, said Haag-Wackernagel.

From Poisoning to "Electric Chairs"

Their population exploded in the 20th century as food became ever cheaper in relation to personal income. The bird is supremely adaptable, finding breeding places in all kinds of unnatural locations ranging from air conditioning vents to warm satellite dishes. Their diet, originally grain-based, has also evolved and town pigeons now eat virtually everything from discarded beef burgers to human vomit.

Major cities have been trying to reduce their pigeon populations since the early 20th century and have resorted to a colourful variety of methods including straight poisoning, shooting, firing nets over flocks with rockets, blasting them with salt pellets and even by means of an "electric chair:" placing food on a high-voltage metal platform to fry the birds alive.

Contraception pills have also been attempted, but they can poison other animals. "Scaring" is another method - London has resorted to Harris hawks and loud megaphones to drive pigeons away from Trafalgar Square. But that technique just moves them to other parts of the city. London has also started fining people for feeding pigeons in the square.

"Killing makes no sense at all," says Haag-Wackernagel. "The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they'll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available." A pair of pigeons can produce up to 12 fledglings per year.

"The best way to reduce the population is not to feed them. People say it's cruel to deprive them of food but in the wild the sudden absence of food is a completely natural occurrence and animals adapt to it."

Less Food, Fewer Pigeons

Haag-Wackernagel developed a scheme for the city of Basel in the 1980s which resulted in a decline in the pigeon population by two thirds in four years. "We launched a campaign to persuade people not to feed the birds. We never put a ban on feeding because that always creates martyrs. We think you have to convince people."

The scheme included setting up nine pigeon lofts in the attics of churches and schools where breeding boxes were installed. "We didn't feed them there and we took some of their eggs away," said Haag-Wackernagel. Depriving pigeons of food also slows down their reproduction because it forces them to devote more time looking for food rather than breed, he said.

The western German town of Moers has come up with a less rigorous scheme. For the past three years it has been recruiting unemployed people as "Pigeon Wardens" to construct and clean out public pigeon coops and feed the animals.

Pigeons still enjoy a considerably better reputation than rats, which suffered a lasting PR setback by spreading the Black Death.

But the birds can and do spread diseases, allergies and parasites to humans. Haag-Wackernagel says many everyday illnesses including allergies can be attributed to human proximity to the birds which carry salmonella, lung illnesses, fleas, ticks and a host of other ailments -- something to think about when surrounded by flapping pigeons in town squares or outdoor cafes.

Pregnant women, children, the elderly and people infected with HIV are particularly at risk from contact with pigeons, said Haag-Wackernagel.

Reducing pigeon populations also gives the birds a better quality of life -- less stress and less cramped living conditions, says Haag-Wackernagel. But die-hard pigeon-fanciers remain unconvinced. "One man in Basel kept on feeding pigeons between 12 and 15 tons of pigeon food per year until he died aged 89."

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WORLD PIGEON POPULATION TO TOP 400 MILLION -

St Paul Mn uses birth control on Pigeons.
Next battle in St. Paul: Pigeon contraception